


I Know That You're There

by musamihi



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2013-05-04
Packaged: 2017-12-10 09:54:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/784745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim committed a murder when he was thirteen.  For ten years, it's been his only friend.  Warnings for death of a child, alcohol abuse, underage sexual activity, and depictions of violence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Know That You're There

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the poem [Bluebird](http://allpoetry.com/poem/8509539-Bluebird-by-Charles_Bukowski), by Charles Bukowski, and created for HolmesMoriarty week over on tumblr. Jim and Sherlock have been meant for one another since long before they met.

Carl Powers foundered and shook like a little bird. His arms thrashed out around him, stiff and slender, raising up white wings of pool water that splashed into his desperate, gaping mouth. Panic fluttered through the children gathered on the benches, among the adults clutching towels and timecards in the corners. The lifeguard dove in, his body a gentle, sweeping curve, and in that moment the entire world felt beautifully fragile.

But soon the noise came crashing down – screams, whistles, sobs, banging doors – and Jim screwed up his face and slapped his hands to his ears and ran to the locker room. There he was alone. He stood hunched for a few moments, his shoulders curled in like window shutters, the new silence rushing between his temples and the empty palms of his hands. When he looked up he saw himself in the mirror hanging beside the door. The blue bruise under his right eye was dark and large and had begun to appear soft. Carl had told him it made him look like his dog, Max. 

He'd got it three days ago at school, in Dublin: one day before he and his mother packed off to her brother's in London to _give Dad a break_ , two days before Jim's cousin Michael and his friend Carl arrived from their fancy school in Sussex for a swim tournament, three days before Jim woke himself up extra early and stole into the bathroom to fix Carl's eczema cream. _I'll bet you've got fleas, too, haven't you? When's the last time you had a bath, doggie?_

Jim turned to the cluttered stretch of floor running the gauntlet between the rows of dented lockers. There were piles of khaki trousers and wrinkled shirts, water bottles and trainers, knapsacks and balled-up socks. Carl's shoes were huge and bright white, set neatly on top of his folded towel. Jim bent and picked them up, and they were at once soft and solid in his hands, like flesh, and something inside of him began to churn like the waves breaking around Carl in the swimming pool. It was as though he could sense the size and delicacy of Carl's body, not just in his hands, but all around him; as though he could feel Carl's fear as an all-enveloping poison, twisting the life out of him. It burned his eyes and seized his throat and made him stare into the hollows of those shoes and he felt –

He _felt sad_. The pain was sweet, like a burst blister. The tears in his eyes brought relief he'd never known, as though something wedged shut had finally swung free. And it was wonderful.

Jim stripped off his jacket and wrapped Carl's shoes in it. He hugged the parcel close to his chest and walked back into the high, roaring room with the pool, where his mother found him and ushered him frantically to a bench.

+++

The door battered against its frame and the sound was hollow, falling weightlessly into the bedroom and into the hall. Through his drooping socks and his room's thick, boyish carpet – too old, too young for him at fifteen – Jim felt his father's footsteps pressing on toward the staircase. The sensation dissipated at his ankles, where his trousers hung just too short. The rest of his body buzzed with the numb fatigue that was the stupid, obligatory chirping of crickets in the movies before the inevitable bomb, the empty lull before the flame. He wanted to blow up. Instead he stood beside his bed ( _without supper, but God knows you can't want any_ ) in his wrinkled whiskey-smelling clothes and exhaled so quietly that even he barely heard it.

He'd thought the fuse had been lit yesterday when Lucas touched him on his backside and made him feel like the world was pitching sideways. His slamming heart and the secret, shameful urge to flee had pushed through him like the lifeguard's whistle, promising to expand into the empty silence and consume all the stagnant air. Lucas – dropout, drugs, Donnycarney, dangerous – had touched him and he'd felt it, _he_ , him, Jim, who could never feel anything enough to make it matter. But then had come all the whiskey, and Jim had sensed that Lucas thought it necessary to the process, so he'd played along, swilling it away in his desperation to collide against something, anything. He'd wanted to feel more of Lucas, so he'd drunk, and drunk, and drunk, until in the end he could barely see straight, never mind tell where his hands were going.

This morning he'd gone into school in the same clothes he'd tossed onto Lucas' floor, creased, stained, reeking, loose with wear. He'd barely sat down before they sent him right home again, and he'd stumbled back and dropped onto the sofa and slept, dead to everything but the disappointment that the only thing that had touched him in years had turned out to be nothing at all.

Mother had come home, cried. Father had come home, shouted, sent his fist sailing through the air to connect with the wall, and Jim had wished he'd been in its path. The words brushed by him like a dull summer breeze, maddening and ineffectual. Shame, waste, stupid, low. None of it had landed on him. None of it had made the slightest impact on his insensible skin. 

His father's footsteps fell away, one, two, three stairs at a time, and were soon replaced by the gentle clanking of the pipes in the walls – mother running him a bath. Wouldn't be hot enough. He could dip his head under, and maybe then it would scald something, the inside of his nose, the back of his lips where Lucas' teeth had never stood any chance against the anaesthetic prick of alcohol. He could lie there and think about not coming up, think about Carl. Poor Carl. Carl, who had never physically touched him, but whom he'd held in his own hands as surely as if God had carved his name there. Nothing had ever felt like Carl before, and nothing had felt like Carl since.

The shoes were in an old pillowcase, hidden carefully in the back of a drawer. Jim knelt to pull them out, making a neat stack of his displaced socks and drawing the bulky parcel tenderly to his chest as though he were calming a frightened animal. They were smaller now, less unwieldy in his hands. The thin, silky fabric of the case caught against leather and laces, sank beneath the tongues and into the long-vacant cavities of the shoes as he crushed it all – never too tightly – against his sternum. The _pain_ , the whirling rush of fear and something soft and sad they once had brought him was fading inexorably with time.

But there was a scent of it still there, if only a scent. It was enough to bring tears to his eyes, like a chlorine sting, but with every shuddering breath it faded, with every wrenching sob he could sense it slipping away, and there started in him a fear that someday it would escape him entirely.

+++

The rickety metal folding chair clacked against the floor as Jim stood, beckoned finally into an office. The police station around him had ceased to bustle quite so much as when he'd arrived an hour and a half ago, and there were long, lulling stretches full only of the rattle of keys, the whisper of paper, lonesome, half-formed conversations over telephones. He'd called ahead, knowing that he was likely to be seen as an irritation. He was here on old business, urgent to no one but him.

For months he'd been in London, and for months, in three different flats, Carl's shoes had occupied their usual space – a dark corner in a closet, the back of a cupboard, the dusty emptiness beneath a mattress. They were with him always, tokens of a past to which he'd long since lost access. He was twenty-three years old, and the boy he'd been ten years ago had been lost somewhere, buried or dissolved or just strangled inside the adult figure that had grown up around him like a fungus. Carl had lost the power to touch him – or maybe it was the other way around – some time ago. Try as he might, for years he'd been unable to call up the _feeling_ that for so long had been his only escape from the increasing weight of his own presence. He felt as though he hadn't had a breath of fresh air in ages, and despaired of ever having one again.

So he'd sought out the last bit of Carl he could think to ask for. He hadn't expected to find much in the way of records; he knew, better than anyone, that even what papers he found were like to be full of lies. The knowledge that he and he alone held the secret of Carl's death was, perhaps, the only thing he could hope for, and he'd hoped that would be enough – he'd hoped for something he could cherish privately, he'd hoped to find that Carl was still his and always would be. Whether it would mean anything, he hadn't known. Whether he would feel it, he couldn't say. But he suspected it was all that remained to him, and so he'd come to claim it.

The file was thin and soft at the edges from having been stuffed for so long into a box, and Jim felt something tantalizingly like a pang of regret to know that every part of Carl had been shut away in the dark for a decade. His breath sat suspended in his throat as the officer explained to him that he could sign for the file, that he could take it to the room around the corner to make copies (for which he would of course pay), that he would bring the file back and leave it with the clerk. Jim nodded where required, and signed his name, and only with difficulty refrained from pulling Carl to his chest again when he took him into his hands and retreated to the busy little room with the copier.

He set the file on the scratched and pen-marked table standing beside bins full of waste paper, and opened it. The death certificate stared back at him, unremarkable, incorrect. A medical report with spare notes and largely unmarked diagrams – diagrams that looked nothing at all like Carl, a strangely jarring two pages of dissonance – were similarly devoid of any whiff of truth. A report with detached and distant quotes from Carl's friends, from Jim's cousin, from the coaches and the lifeguard, confirmed the innocence of the tragedy, the unexpected blow of inexplicable drowning. Jim turned page after page, feeling nothing, not even impatience, at finding nothing of himself in this account of the only moment that had ever mattered to him.

But then – then, one thin, crisp sheet of notebook paper covered in lovely blue schoolboy handwriting, clipped to a painstakingly addressed envelope and a curling, yellowed mess of heavily outlined and annotated newspaper articles. Suddenly, a surprise.

Jim ran his hands down the shallow dips and lines of the letter, wondering for a moment whether he had written this and forgotten it. But it was too neat, too well-formed – and the newspapers he had never seen, London publications that never would have reached him after he and his mother had slipped away to Dublin the day after Carl's drowning. And the language, almost lofty with scorn, had never been his. He read it again and again, an ache building in the sides of his face where his grin lodged deeper and deeper, unnoticed.

_To Whom It May Concern,_

_Enclosed you will find all accounts of the death of Carl Powers that have been released in reputable newspapers since the day he drowned. I have noted several suspicious circumstances. Please note that I have already phoned the officer in charge several times and have received no response to any of my messages. Frankly I do not understand why a man investigating what I believe to be a murder cannot be bothered to read the Times but obviously he hasn't done as any fool who has read what I have would determine at once that there has been foul play. My observations are set out in the following articles but as I am sure you are all too busy to read them never mind answer phone calls I have set them out in the following list:_

_(1) There is no such thing as a fit. Carl Powers did not have a fit in the water. He may have had a seizure or come under the influence of some foreign substance and both of these can be eliminated or confirmed by a proper examination which to my knowledge has not occurred._

_(2) Carl Powers' shoes are missing. The rest of his clothes are accounted for and presumably no one honestly believes he arrived barefoot. Where are his shoes? Who would take them unless it was for a trophy or to hide something? His shoes are absolutely key I repeat absolutely key and no one as far as I can see is even looking for them._

_(3) Reports indicate Carl Powers was staying with the family of a school friend and I recommend you inspect the home for environmental hazards which does not appear to have been done as of yet and I cannot imagine why._

_I hope you have found this enlightening. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. You should at least want to know whether I was involved in any way and I am disappointed that I have not yet been interrogated._

_Yours sincerely,_

_Sherlock Holmes_

Sherlock Holmes.

The familiar fluttering precursor to sweet, hot pain failed to materialise behind his ribs, but in its place something expanded – something filled, finally, that Jim hadn't realised until this very moment had been empty and aching for air. He felt – calm. No tempestuous thrashing, no desperate yearning whose only balm was the very knowledge that it could never be satisfied. For the first time, he felt _something_ in place of the absent pain instead of _nothing_ – he was soothed rather than numbed.

For so long, Carl was – he'd thought – the only one with whom he'd ever shared anything, and what they'd shared had been a vacancy, a loss, a silence. To discover that all the while, that every single day from that beginning ten years ago, they two had never been alone, had never been two but had been three, touched him so deeply that his throat thickened. His chest rose and fell in heaves as though it had never before been free to move. He stood for several minutes until a woman came and set her hand on his shoulder and asked if he needed anything, and he realised that the letter was stained, its blue ink running where his tears had mingled with it.

She offered to help him make copies, but he thanked her and said it wasn't necessary and returned the file. He didn't need to take it with him; he resided in it now, the same as Carl, the same as Sherlock Holmes. All three of them together, woven inextricably in time, the only fabric that no one could rip.

Jim went outside into the city, knowing for the first time that there was something – someone – for whom he could reach into the future, and beginning to loosen his wretched grip on the spent past.


End file.
